Xyleme Learning Blog

Xyleme Learning Blog has evolved! We would like to invite you to the Xyleme Insider, our new and redesigned blog that has broadened its horizons to the whole new area of enterprise learning. Enjoy!

eLearning Weekly: Blogging on the article “E-Learning NO How: 7 disastrous decisions sure to sink any e-learning implementation”. Some tips to avoid failure.

Will at Work Learning: Lists of Myths That the Business Side Has About Learning (according to learning professionals).

Josh Bersin: Informal Learning becomes Formal – That is to say Informal Learning is made real and valuable.

Dale Waldt: Will XML Help this President? XML and related technology is a powerful tool for government. “I think there is a very big role for XML and related technology in the aggressive, sweeping change promised by this administration”.

Interviews at Learning Visions: Some Instructional design insight shared by Instructional designers. What skills they feel are important for instructional designers, and what they feel the future of the field will be. Students interested in instructional design, you might want to listen to this!

As we start the New Year I thought I’d chat about our latest announcement - Xyleme LCMS running as an integrated solution (application) on EMC’s Documentum platform. If you have been following Xyleme, you will know that we have always been built on a native XML content platform. Up until now, the major ECM players have not provided an XML platform that could handle the granularity and performance required by our application. But this has changed with EMC’s acquisition of X-Hive last year and its recent integration into the Documentum platform. We can now offer an integrated solution with the world’s leading ECM platform.

Read the rest of this entry »

Numerous instructional designers talk about their dilemmas when creating e-learning courses. One common option is to use off-the-shelf tools such as MS Office to create their e-learning content. However, this often leads to having to struggle to get this content translated into other languages.

This issue was recently addressed in the latest Reusability 2.0 webinar “Simplifying Compliance Training”. The webinar was mostly centered on knowledge management for compliance training. One of the questions posed to the panelists was how language translation related to content delivery and control. Mark Hellinger, President and CEO of Xyleme, answered:

Read the rest of this entry »

Weblogg-ed: Getting off paper.

Dave’s Whiteboard: Dave remembers Geary Rummler, who helped him get leaner in instructional design.

Informal Learning: A report from the DevLearn panel on eLearning research and its web 2.0 intersections.

Helge Scherlund’s eLearning News Blog: Online courses booming as the economy ramps down.

TravelinEdMan: An interview with Dr. Ellen Wagner, principal analyst at Sonoma LLP, before her keynote speech at this November’s E-Learn Conference in Las Vegas.

“My belief is that very few people go to work to do a bad job. I’d say that 98% of people who go to work want to do a great job.” - John Catlin, CEO, TACTICS Consulting

A portion of the November 6th webinar, Reusability 2.0: Simplifying Compliance Training, included a discussion between Catlin and panel host Cushing Anderson, VP of HR for IDC, on how to make it easy for employees to do their jobs well.

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the 6th Working/Learning blog carnival! Thanks very much to Dave Ferguson for kicking it off and letting us host it this time (more details and how you can host it, here,) and to all the very talented folks who’ve contributed the posts you’re about to enjoy. And we’re off …

• Ferguson writes about using training as a last resort after fully evaluating workflow and incentive structures so that it can be true performance support.
• Laurie Bartels writes about an expansive view of professional development that, as she quoted Elkhonon Goldberg saying, turns “neuroplasticity to your advantage.” Mmm, neuroplasticity.
• Karyn Romeis encourages people not to get so caught up in predetermined steps that they forget how much fun learning is and how much they can enjoy it.
• Ken Allan writes about the energy required for the learning process, and how it can be supplied by a teacher’s pedagogical and scaffolding techniques even for individualized elearning. And I’ve seen the truth of his conclusion in my own studies, that without the meta-cognition of what you’re building towards, as supplied by an instructor or a learner of a certain level, self-directed learning can lose focus quickly.
• Harold Jarche thinks that if mass marketing is dead, mass training will soon follow.
• Penny Ryder is interested in feedback about how to build links with her students’ parents so she can be a more effective instructor.

And … that’s it, everyone! I’ve had a great time reading through these contributions and would recommend hosting the carnival to anyone whose day is brightened when their inbox gets loaded with good reading material. See you around next time

Manish Mohan recently wrote a post, in response to the monthly Learning Circuits question, describing resources on how to get started with instructional design. In it, he said the following about what he looks for in recruits:

… But honestly, as a manager who has had to recruit for ID, I look for prior experience, and if there is no prior experience, I look for their core writing skills and ability to learn. Having a diploma is good but not essential.

… Basically you need to have good writing skills. This is most critical to get into instructional design job. … [They are] typically what is tested by companies for taking on new IDs. …

Which suggests that instructional design hopefuls can also get a lot of use out of resources that help them with their writing quality. So you might want to check out recent posts at Dave’s Whiteboard and Making Change on the subject of how to write for readability …

Read the rest of this entry »

Be sure to stop back by on the 20th, when we’ll be hosting the Working/Learning Blog Carnival. Until then, here’s a grab bag of edubloggers and others who are interested in expanding people’s capacity to think effectively …

Janet Clarey: Responding to the monthly Learning Circuits question, a look at how a newbie can approach e-learning.

Harold Jarche: Instructional design with a greedy algorithm may allow more agility.

Brain Blogger: The brain blogging carnival awaits you. (via)

Ken Carroll: Will the economic crunch pave the way for widespread networked learning as a viable replacement for many venues of formal education?

Apemyp: A brief overview of Xerox’ blended learning supported SAP software rollout, using an approach that cost them less and still boosted worker productivity.

Over at Weblogg-ed, Will Richardson looks at the differences he’s noticed between reading online and reading on paper. This section especially jumped out at me:

… For some reason, probably because I was a former English teacher, I reflect on this whole reading is changing discussion a lot. Probably 75% of what I read I read online. The other 25% is almost all books. I read all of my news from papers, magazines, etc. online, all of my correspondence, all of the blogs that I follow. And, as I’ve written before, my reading habits have changed a great deal. It has become an effort for me to work with longer texts, to do sustained reading and thinking, to stick with complex narratives. …

Read the rest of this entry »